I am currently running Vista on my new shiny tablet.

And for the most part this has been a wonderful experience. I find the user-interface to be significantly more elegant. The system as a whole seems to hang better together than XP.

However, I did run into a problem with my VPN. Now it turns out, for reasons that are a complete mystery to me, that Norton 360 and my Cisco VPN will not work together. After a lot of pain and frustration I decided to call Symantec today and ask for help.

First the helpful person on the phone told me to wait a sec while she logged on to my computer. To which I responded:

How do I disable that feature?

After a lot of time on the phone, the helpful person told me to:

1. Add a rule that allows any piece of software to use any port and any protocol to go in and out of my computer
2. Trust every interface.

I was in a rush, and just relieved I could use my VPN and have some kind of antivirus software, so I didn’t pay too much attention to what she told me to do.

But later on this evening I thought…

Hmmm…

Now I may not be a network expert but step 1 and step 2 are the moral equivalent of:

Turn off the firewall.

Symantec rather than tell me honestly:

Dude the product you spent 79$ doesn’t actually work with this other piece of software, so go to advanced options and turn off the firewall.

The helpful helpdesk person walked me through a convoluted process to disable the software without explicitly disabling it.

Blech.